Silicon carbide (SiC), a material known for its toughness with applications from abrasives to car brakes, to high-temperature power electronics, has enjoyed renewed interest for its potential in quantum technology. Its ability ...

A team of physicists from RUDN, JINR (Dubna), and the University of Hamburg (Germany) developed a mathematical model for describing physical processes in hybrid systems that consists of atoms and ions cooled down to temperatures ...

A recent discovery by William & Mary and University of Michigan researchers transforms our understanding of one of the most important laws of modern physics. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, has broad implications ...

Spiros Michalakis, manager of outreach and staff researcher at Caltech's Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), and Matthew Hastings, a researcher at Microsoft, have solved one of the world's most challenging ...

After their recent pioneering experiments to couple light and matter to an extreme degree, Rice University scientists decided to look for a similar effect in matter alone. They didn't expect to find it so soon.

How Einstein's equivalence principle extends to the quantum world has been puzzling physicists for decades, but a team including a University of Queensland researcher has found the key to this question.

Quantum communication and cryptography are the future of high-security communication. But many challenges lie ahead before a worldwide quantum network can be set up, including propagating the quantum signal over long distances. ...

Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a set of principles underlying the most fundamental known description of all physical systems at the submicroscopic scale (at the atomic level). Notable among these principles are simultaneous wave-like and particle-like behavior of matter and radiation ("Wave–particle duality"), and the prediction of probabilities in situations where classical physics predicts certainties. Classical physics can be derived as a good approximation to quantum physics, typically in circumstances with large numbers of particles. Thus quantum phenomena are particularly relevant in systems whose dimensions are close to the atomic scale, such as molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and other subatomic particles. Exceptions exist for certain systems which exhibit quantum mechanical effects on macroscopic scale; superfluidity is one well-known example. Quantum theory provides accurate descriptions for many previously unexplained phenomena such as black body radiation and stable electron orbits. It has also given insight into the workings of many different biological systems, including smell receptors and protein structures.